Deel 5 - LA36 KB articles 1988 98 and cuttings 126 005

1 digital image

-5- punishments are enforced in case a country and its leader refuses to bend the knee. What greater hypocrisy can there be than the treatment of Iraq and Libya when Israel continues to defy more than 40 Security Council resolutions - some of them with a history of decades - with impunity. Indeed, not even the most servile Arab regime could fail to be shocked by the US exercise of the first Security Council veto of the Clinton Administration in order to shield fresh Israeli land grabs in Jerusalem. Whilst the United States can manipulate the Security Council to function as an instrument of global dictatorship, the General Assembly, where every member state has an equal voice and a single vote, is bypassed, slighted and ignored. For the last four years, the General Assembly has voted by an overwhelming majority to condemn the US blockade of Cuba. In the last such vote - in November 1994 - only Israel was prepared to vote with the US. But the United States is not only ignoring the voice of the international community - the Republican-dominated Congress is preparing new laws that, in a clear violation of international law, would extend the blockade to foreign ships, US subsidiaries in third countries, foreign companies and trading organisations and sovereign states. These proposals are so outrageous that even the British government has protested! Another clear instance of double standards concerns the recent 25- year review and indefinite extension of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) points out, this indefinite and unconditional renewal makes the prospect of a nuclear-free world less rather than more likely. It entrenches an arbitrary nuclear monopoly on the part of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Like the United Nations itself, the NPT's original aims have been twisted, distorted and forgotten. The original idea for the NPT came from a former Irish Foreign Minister, the late Frank Aiken, whose goal was to completely rid the world of nuclear weapons. At the recent NPT review conference, today's Irish Foreign Minister, the leader of the Irish Labour Party, Dick Spring, told the world that the only acceptable level of nuclear weapons in the world is zero. But the big nuclear powers have no intention of scrapping their arsenals or giving up the terrible danger that they pose. They even interpret their arbitrary monopoly in a unilateral and partisan way. Countries such as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Iran, which are developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, are accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons, and every kind of pressure is brought to bear on

full_reference_code